Technical Article

The Best Day to Blog Experiment - Day 3

If you missed the past two days, welcome to The Best Day to Blog Experiment; you are now a participant. For the first time readers, I’ve come across many stories about when is the best day/time to get the most readership exposure from a blog post and I figured I’d do my own little brief, non-scientific experiment. The idea is to blog everyday this week, track the results and report back next week. Thanks for becoming a statistic. Yesterday, I noted that it was important to have a good opening line to grab your readers, yet I’ve repeated this exact opening 3 days in a row. I’m wondering if this will have any influence on the results. I guess that’s part of the test – follow the rules, break the rules and see what happens. I’m now on Day 3 of the experiment and so far Day 1 (Monday) actually got some good traction and Day 2 (Tuesday) is trending well with a 6.5% jump in visits over Monday. Bounce Rate and Time on Site are also in the positive day over day. I’m tweeting the post(s) a couple times a day to catch folks all over. I do this sometimes, especially if I post late in the day – I’ll tweet the link out early the next morning hoping to catch readers who might have missed it the previous afternoon or re-tweet late in the day if I’ve posted very early. Oh and by the way, I really want to thank those of you who are playing along at home – without you, I’d have no data.

Welcome to Wednesday, hump-day, mid-week and originally Woden’s Day, for the Anglo-Saxon god Woden. Wednesday is also a very good day to post a blog according to a few reports and it happens to be one of the more likely days that a reader would comment. Like Tuesday, posting mid-week allows readers to find the entry even if they miss the initial syndication. I’ve read that both Tuesday and Thursday are the best days to post a blog, so sitting in the middle of the two should garner results, right? Lorelle VanFossen, who writes about blogging says that sometimes it isn’t about when you post but it’s about when the most people visit your blog. She notes that while certain days do draw more viewers in general, knowing when the best day/time to post is more about understanding which day of the week your traffic levels will be highest and making sure content is available during those times or; post your ‘most poignant’ content during that window. Another interesting angle is that we train our audience when to show up, so the actual day might not matter. If you blog every day and your readers have been trained to watch for it daily, when you miss a few days without notice, folks wonder what happened. I’ve mentioned that I usually post either on Tuesday or Wednesday and I’m guessing that is when my readers ‘look’ for content. It makes sense then, that a post on Friday probably won’t (and it hasn’t) gain views since my regular readers are not looking for it then. If they do come across it, it might not get the depth or engagement since the weekend is right around the corner. I’ll be watching for that 2 days from now. It’s interesting so far that what started as a simple test to determine the best day to blog, has generated more observations and additional questions along the way – meaning, things I didn’t consider at the start are becoming interesting to watch as this moves along.

The recurring part that’s also been fun is adding ‘Songs about the Day’ as a theme during this blog experiment – thinking it might be the one consistent part that ties this series together. All week, I’ve used The Y! Radish’s blog about ‘songs with days in the title’ and am going to once again ‘lift’ his list for songs about Wednesday.